CF card as sole storage device and partitioning of

Forum: HD Install
Topic: CF card as sole storage device and partitioning of
started by: lesliek

Posted by lesliek on Nov. 12 2006,01:01

I got a tiny computer, about the size of three slices of bread one on top of the other. It has 128MB of RAM (which can't be increased). It has no floppy, hard or optical drive, but one can plug in a CF card and/or a USB flash drive.

It came with a 512MB CF card (with Puppy Linux, which I don't want to run, pre-installed on the card). I created a live CD of DSL v 3.01, installed DSL to a USB drive, booted the tiny computer up from that USB drive and then did a frugal install of DSL to the CF card. After that, I'm now able to boot up DSL from the CF card.

Before doing the frugal install, I didn't partition the CF card, because I just wanted to assure myself that booting up DSL from the CF card was possible on that computer.

Now that I know that it is possible, I'd like to run the tiny computer with the CF card being my only storage device. Do people think that's feasible?

If so, I'd like to partition the card.

In the past, I've done frugal installs of DSL on old laptops with only 64MB of RAM, but with hard drives containing much more storage space than the CF card. With them, I created a swap partition of 128MB and divided the remaining space equally between two other partitions, one of which was my boot partition.

What do people think is the most efficient way for me to divide up the available space on the CF card? Should I create two partitions of 128MB each and a swap partition of 256MB?

I'd be grateful for any advice about how to proceed.

Thanks,

Leslie

Posted by The_Prophet_Jonah on Nov. 12 2006,06:49

why not use a usb flash card as the swap partition? It would have the advantage of being on a separate controller from the / partition. It would register as SCSI emulation too. Plus the physical distance between the two controllers would be like what, 2 inches or less? with that you might get a measurable fraction of the speed of writing directly to RAM and back.

I would almost bet it would come up to half the speed of RAM, and on a swap file that would be really impressive.

Posted by roberts on Nov. 12 2006,13:46

With CF type devices having a limited number of writes, I would not recommnd to use a swap partition on it. IMHO I don't see any advantage to partition it. If this computer has usb ports, then perhaps consider a usb micro drive.

Posted by lesliek on Nov. 13 2006,03:48

Thank you both for your replies.

Putting a swap partition on a USB drive (or indeed putting that drive to any other use permanently) means that I'd have to be sure to have that drive plugged in any time I used the computer. Knowing me, I'm not sure that I'd remember.

I'll just try to use the thing with the CF card as it is for now and see what happens.

Thanks again,

Leslie